Today we've prepared an ultimate tips-from-the-expert type of content.
Recently, Apiko Team interviewed Gene Linetsky who’s the lead techie (CTO) at
RealtyShares, a real estate investment company. We know what secrets of
successful development methods Gene revealed to us, but how about you?
Let’s not waste time anymore and learn about another success story created by
the actual people.

Gene, you are a Chief Technology Officer at RealtyShares, real
estate investment company. Could you tell us about the milestones
of your career?
The three main areas of interest throughout my career were
education, Internet security, and trading. Most of the startups I
founded and co-founded since 2000 fall into one of these
categories. Real estate is one of the last remaining asset classes
that's still not tradable, and that's what I'm hoping RealtyShares
makes possible.

I noticed that your real estate investment application is built on
React js. How did you come to the decision to develop the app using
this JavaScript framework? What kind of benefits and limitations of
using React js could you point out (based on your experience)?
I discovered React at my previous startup, Versal. We even
sponsored an education-focused meetup on React where one of its
founding fathers, Pete Hunt, presented. The key benefit of React is
in its unique ability to enable component-based Web apps, and React
Native is probably the only viable methodology to bring app-level
performance to the mobile Web.

Gene, let Apiko’s readers into the secret of your company’s
internal business processes. Can you describe us how RealtyShares
service has been developing over these years from the technical perspective? What significant RealtyShares features have you built?
RealtyShares powers all aspects of the investment process online,
from deal sourcing to closing to asset management to exits. To that
end, we've developed and deployed a set of internal and external
services utilizing a number of platforms such as AWS and
Salesforce. Our backend is based on the event log architecture,
which enables fine-grained auditability and very high performance.
It's written in C++ and based in part on an open source project Current. Our frontend is
composed of a number of React modules comprising various areas of
Web app functionality for both investors and real estate
professionals.

In pursuit of the previous question, what are the top features the
RealtyShares customers appreciate the most?
The ability to invest directly in a selection of handpicked real
estate projects providing superior returns at a lower risk.

Speaking of your development team internal processes, could you
share some app development best practices and how to develop the
financial product roadmap, build new features, and set out the
priorities? And overall, make your team work productively?
One of the most successful ideas we've implemented is the idea of a
development pod: a small team of engineers and designers, usually
headed by a product manager, who work very closely with their
respective business stakeholders. For example, we have a 5-person
development pod working on the asset management functionality we
built into our Salesforce instance.

Some time ago you told us in your corporate blog that you are going
to use machine learning to improve the leads conversion. Gene,
please tell us more about this initiative? Did you achieve any
positive result?
The initial results are very promising and the project is now
deemed strategically important for the company. We've been able to
make certain predictions about the behavior of our real estate
partner companies that dramatically improved the number of deals
each of our underwriters can process, resulting in much higher
revenue per underwriter. The details are commercial secret.

From your professional perspective, could you suggest our readers
the must-have features that should be implemented into any
financial app?

Speed, reliability, and leading with the mobile version.

The outcome is that we can see how rich experience background and skills
are pushing for the new ideas and give the world better app development
methods and best practices that result in innovative products. Thank you
Gene for the quick response and valuable opinion sharing.

Have some stories to share? We’d be glad to hear them out and publish on
our blog. Don’t be shy and drop by ;)